Recently, House lawmakers filed their third quarter campaign disclosure reports -- and you know what that means! It's time for another round-up of how much lawmakers have dropped on lawyers to defend themselves from investigation.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), with nearly $1 million in total fees dating back to last year, remains the undisputed House champion, but Rep. Don Young (R-AK) is charging hard.

Here's our list of legal spending habits for the past three months, as well as an estimate of how much each lawmaker has spent in campaign funds to date and to which firms:

Rep. Don Young (R-AK): $183,785
So far, Young has spent $447,000 on the law firms Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld and Tobin O'Connor Ewing & Richard (the vast majority of which is spent on Akin Gump). He's under investigation for his relationship with Bill Allen, former CEO of oil-services firm.

Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ): $111,042
Renzi has paid around $148,000 to law firms Patton Boggs LLP and Steptoe & Johnson LLP (primarily on Patton Boggs). Renzi remains under investigation by the FBI for pushing legislation that would advantage political supporters and former business partners. His house was raided by the FBI this past April. Renzi has announced that he will not seek another term.

Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-WV): $55,000
Mollohan has spent $78,000 on the law firm Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd, Evans & Figel. He has been under federal scrutiny since last May for earmarking funds for organizations connected to him.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA): $26,982
Lewis has spent over $987,000 on the law firms Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Williams & Jensen. He is being investigated for earmarks that he provided to campaign contributors, as well as his role in the Duke Cunningham scandal.

Read more »

CQ reports that former-Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is serving his last term in Congress:

After less than a year as a rank-and-file House member, former Speaker J. Dennis Hastert is expected to call an end to a political career that made him the longest serving Republican Speaker in the history of the House of Representatives.

Several Illinois newspapers, including the Aurora Beacon News and the Chicago Tribune, reported Tuesday that the Illinois Republican has scheduled a Friday announcement on the steps of the Kendall County Courthouse in Yorkville, Ill. While Hastert aides are refusing to discuss what he plans to say, he is expected to announce that he will not run for a 12th term in 2008, according to Republican sources.

There will be some who'll remember Hastert mainly as ex-Majority Leader Tom DeLay's (R-TX) plaything.

But we here at TPMmuckraker prefer to remember him for his even lower moments, such as convening Republican leaders after the Mark Foley scandal broke to get their stories straight for the press. Unfortunately for Hastert, not even that ten-thumbed effort managed to keep the inconsistencies from piling up. Even the toothless ethics committee report on the scandal found that Hastert and others had "willfully" ignored Foley's interest in House pages.

Thanks for the memories!

The reviews are in on the House ethics committee report on the Foley scandal, and they aren't good.

"[A] 91-page exercise in cowardice," a New York Times editorial thundered."The report’s authors were clearly more concerned about protecting the members of the House than the young men and women under their charge in the page program."

"What, one has to wonder, would it take for the House ethics committee to hold a lawmaker or a staff member accountable?" asked the Washington Post in its editorial, "The Buck Just Stopped." (The Wall Street Journal, however, pronounced the report "fair and sensible.")

Even some GOPers are whispering that those who dodged a bullet only did so because the committee purposely fired above their heads. Roll Call's John Bresnahan quoted one unnamed "Republican insider" with ties to Hastert who called the report a "shrewd political document" that carefully criticized only members and staff who were leaving power.

"They kicked people who don't care anymore," the source told Bresnahan. "Hastert doesn't care, and the other guys don't care either. . . . This doesn't hurt them at all."

It sounds from the report that Ted Van Der Meid, Speaker Dennis Hastert's counsel, had his own problems with being too close with the House pages. From pages 39-40:

According to [House Clerk Jeff Trandahl], he raised his concerns about Rep. Foley to Van Der Meid "pretty often" in the context of raising similar concerns he had relative to Van Der Meid's over-involvement with pages assigned to the Speaker's office. Trandahl testified, "So here is my point of contact in the Speaker (sic), and I'm trying to have the conversation about him specifically, but also in a general sense." According to Trandahl, while Van Der Meid understood his concerns "politically," Van Der Meid's "pushback" was that "there is nothing wrong with people being mentors and caring about the kids." Trandahl responded that the page program had paid professionals to serve those functions. Trandahl felt that "there needed to be a very clear line between the page program and people who worked up here [in leadership]."

Van Der Meid did not report Trandahl's concerns about Rep. Foley's conduct to anyone else in the Speaker's Office... He explained that he did not elevate the Foley matter because he "got the impression that [Trandahl] was dealing with it."... He further testified that "[Trandahl] had never asked me to take any other action," and in any event, "I don't know what I would have done."

Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe (R) isn't the only guy to take a beating in the House Ethics Committee report on the Foley scandal.

The panel finds that Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) all but abandoned his responsibilities as chairman of the House Page Board. "Rep. Shimkus should have demanded copies of all relevant e-mails or other documents," the report states. "[A]t a minimum Rep. Shimkus had an obligation to learn more facts regarding the e-mails [between Foley and a page] before concluding that he could handle the matter himself without informing the other members of the Page Board or seeking their input."

They also pull up just short of accusing House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) of conspiring to obstruct justice, when he tried to rope other GOPers with conflicting stories into meeting with him to "prepare a statement." To the panel, that smacked of an attempt to coordinate a plausible lie:

[T]he efforts by the Speaker's office to prepare a statement under the direction of counsel could have had the additional effect of inhibiting the Investigative Subcommittee's ability to secure evidence. . . This effect was compounded by the appearance of [lawyer Randy] Evans and a law partner as counsel for the Speaker, Stokke and Kennedy during their testimony before the Subcommittee.

Some may recall that Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) refused to attend the meeting. But that doesn't keep him clear of suspicion. He only did that on advice of his counsel -- the aforementioned Randy Evans, who had the thankless (though likely profitable) job of keeping all the men out of trouble.

Finally, Vanity Fair has delivered their take-out on the Mark Foley scandal (or Pagegate, if you prefer). And it's chock full of satisfyingly sordid details.

One figure in particular gets a drubbing: the out-going House Speaker, Dennis Hastert.

Here's Hastert, standing dumbly by when Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff and then Rep. Tom Reynolds' (R-NY) chief of staff, brings word of the coming calamity -- that ABC News has copies of sexually explicit instant messages sent by Foley to underage pages:

Fordham thought he made it clear that his old boss needed to quit, but Foley couldn't bring himself to do that. The N.R.C.C. headquarters was around the corner, and Fordham made it his next stop. There he found Representative Reynolds and Speaker Hastert. But before he could finish relaying the awful news, Reynolds's face got purple and he began to shout, "He needs to resign, and he needs to do it right now!" The Speaker just sat there, silent, according to Fordham: "He didn't react at all. This was weeks before the election, and they're thinking how this is going to impact us."

And here's Hastert trying to attempt damage control:

Hastert, believing the leadership needed to present a united front, as one by one his colleagues were repudiating his foggy recollections, called a Republican-leadership meeting. That same day, an ethics-committee investigation was pressed for by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (over the objections of those who wanted an independent counsel), its purpose to discover who knew what when about Foley. Blunt, Boehner, and Reynolds were all summoned "to basically get their stories straight for the press," according to a knowledgeable source, who adds, "That to me is where Hastert attempted a cover-up."

Reynolds balked at having such a meeting. "This is stupid! We can't all go and meet privately and try to get our stories straight, because this matter was just referred to the ethics committee," he told Hastert, according to the same source. "In fact, none of us are supposed to be talking to each other, because we are not supposed to talk to potential witnesses." Worse, added Reynolds, "I can tell you anything we say at this leadership meeting is something we have to share with the ethics committee."

The meeting eventually became a conference call, but without Reynolds's participation.

Read the whole thing here.

Congressional Quarterly reporting:

Two former House committee investigators who were examining Capitol Hill security upgrades said a senior aide to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert hindered their efforts before they were abruptly ordered to stop their probe last year.

The former Appropriations Committee investigators said Ted Van Der Meid, Hastert’s chief counsel, resisted from the start the inquiry, which began with concerns about mismanagement of a secret security office and later probed allegations of bid-rigging and kickbacks from contractors to a Defense Department employee.

Ronald Garant and a second Appropriations Committee investigator who asked not to be identified said Van Der Meid engaged in “screaming matches” with investigators and told at least one aide not to talk to them. Van Der Meid also prohibited investigators from visiting certain sites to check up on the effectiveness of the work, the investigators said.

From the AP:

An aide to House Speaker Dennis Hastert on Wednesday went before ethics investigators in private to explain how the office handled complaints about former Rep. Mark Foley's behavior toward former pages.

Ted Van Der Meid, who oversaw the page program for Hastert, R-Ill., appears to be one of the last witnesses. The House ethics panel is investigating whether lawmakers and staff aides acted properly when learning of Foley's too-friendly messages to ex-pages and other possible inappropriate behavior.

The panel is in its third week of hearing testimony and seems unlikely to complete its probe before the Nov. 7 elections.

Armed with his personal lawyer, House Speaker Dennis Hastert began his private testimony today before the House panel investigating the Foley affair, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

"Shortly before the speaker appeared, his security detail arrived and went inside the ethics committee room, where testimony is taken in secret sessions. Hastert then arrived with his attorney, J. Randolph Evans of Atlanta," the paper says.

Also testifying today was Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), which works to get Republicans elected to Congress. The two men disagree on who knew what, when about Foley's misbehavior with teenaged pages.

After a quiet Friday and a relaxing weekend, the House panel investigating the Foley scandal is back in business.

The special four-member subcommittee heard from Hastert confidante, housemate and chief of staff Scott Palmer, as well as Sally Vastola, the executive director of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). The group, which works to elect Republicans to House seats, is chaired by Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), who's under fire for knowing about Mark Foley's inappropriate communications with pages. Vastola is also a senior aide on Reynolds' congressional staff.

Reynolds himself is expected to testify tomorrow. Later this week, the panel is expected to hear from Hastert's counsel Ted Van Der Meid, and his deputy chief of staff, Mike Stokke. Top Hastert aides have retained defense lawyers, ABC News reports. Van Der Meid has chosen K. Lee Blalack, who also represents former GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, now in prison for accepting bribes.

Hastert may testify this week, although CQ reports (sub. req.) that members of his staff say he has not been contacted by the panel. Another possible witness may also be interviewed by the panel, CQ says: Tim Kennedy, a staff assistant in Hastert's office who heard of Foley's icky emails back in 2005.

ABC News has a taste of Trandahl's testimony:

The former clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl, who testified for more than four hours before the House Ethics Committee today, is believed to have testified that a top aide to House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed of "all issues dealing with the page program," according to a Republican familiar with the investigation.

The Republican source said Trandahl planned to name Ted Van Der Meid, the speaker's counsel and floor manager, as the person who was briefed on a regular basis about any issue that arose in the page program, including a "problem group of members and staff who spent too much time socializing with pages outside of official duties." One of whom was Mark Foley.

Van Der Meid, you might remember, was one of the Hastert staffers who was involved in the fall, 2005 response to the "overly friendly" emails that Foley had sent to a staffer. Hastert had described Van Der Meid as "the Speaker's Office liaison with the Clerk's Office."

That brings to two the number of staffers in Hastert's office who allegedly knew about Foley's pursuit of House pages before last fall. According to Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, Trandahl also alerted Hastert's chief of staff Scott Palmer about Foley's behavior.

Dr. K.A. Paul, the evangelist who says he convinced House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to resign over Foleygate, is upset that Hastert's promise didn't stick. So he's calling a news conference:

Leading Evangelist Who Met with Hastert to Hold Major News Conference to Offer Details

Religious Leader Upset Speaker Hastert Broke 7 Day Commitment

News Advisory:

Dr. K. A. Paul, the evangelist who met and prayed with House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) at his home in Plano, Ill., will hold a news conference on Wednesday to outline what Speaker Hastert said to him about a 7-day commitment he made during the meeting.

The Sun-Times called the meeting a "serious security breach," but a spokeswoman for the Capitol Police, which is responsible for Speaker Hastert's security, said "this wasn't a security breach," according to the Capital Hill newspaper, Roll Call.

With the midterm elections next month, Paul has launched a crusade to save America from the wrath of God and Republicans abusing their power and mired in scandal. Paul has been supported and endorsed by major Republican and evangelical leaders across the country. He prayed with President Bush and mobilized thousands of voters in Florida to help him win the 2000 presidential election and has counseled more than 60 heads of state around the world.

DATE: Wednesday, Oct. 18

TIME: 10 a.m.

PLACE: Hilton Towers Joliet Room, 720 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, Ill.

PARTICIPANTS:

Dr. K. A. Paul, evangelist and president, Global Peace Initiative

Dorothy Brown, clerk, Cook County Circuit Court

Dr. Jacob Agepog, Archbishop-elect

The special subcommittee of the House ethics panel that's looking into the Foley scandal met again today, hearing testimony from two key witnesses.

Danielle Savoy, a former aide to Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) -- who sponsored one of the pages who received inappropriate emails from Foley -- spoke with the panel this morning. Savoy was the first Alexander staffer the page told of the emails.

In the afternoon, Alexander's chief of staff, Royal Alexander (no relation), took the witness chair.

Also slated for appearance before the panel today: Rep. Dale E. Kildee (D-MI), a member of the page board who says he was never told of Foley's behavior.

Tomorrow, the panel is expected to hear from House Sergeant at Arms Wilson Livingood, according to CQ (sub. req.). House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), is is scheduled to appear Thursday.

New questions are being raised over the credibility of the panel's probe, however. Existing political ties -- including donations from House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), whose behavior is under investigation, to panel members -- have already cast doubt on the panel's trustworthiness.

Congressional Quarterly's Alan Ota takes a look at some of the ambitions held by GOP members of the panel -- ambitions that only Dennis Hastert has the power to fulfill:

Read more »

Shortly after the Mark Foley scandal blew up, Speaker Dennis Hastert boasted to Rush Limbaugh that there was no knocking him off stride -- he was planning to campaign in thirty different districts in the month preceding the election.

It's not happening.

The cancellations are frequent but quiet, so it's been nearly impossible to keep track of them all. The Washington Post last week put at 12 the growing tally of scrubbed events that were to feature Hastert or another scandal-tarnished figure, NRCC chair Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY).

By far the most popular explanation has been "scheduling conflicts." Here's a sampling of excuses:

Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA): a spokesman for explained that a Hastert fundraiser was "cancelled mostly because Sherwood had another major event the next day." A Reynolds spokesman said that he'd dropped out of a Sherwood event because of "events in his own district." But then The Washington Post went and ruined all that hard work by straigtforwardly reporting that Sherwood had "told both men not to come to his district, forgoing crucial campaign dollars to minimize additional negative news coverage."

Read more »

Unveiling his "buck stops here" rhetoric last week, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) announced he was going to order up an independent panel to "advise us on the page program," in response to the Foley scandal. Remember?

The morning of the press conference, Ex-FBI chief Louis Freeh had been the rumored head of the panel, and the effort was thought to be an investigation -- but by the time Hastert appeared before reporters, he said only that he was "looking for a person of high caliber" to "advise" on the program.

So whatever happened to that?

In a word, nothing.

Read more »

At least three people will tell the House ethics committee that Speaker Hastert knew about Mark Foley's problem with House pages before it became public ten days ago. That testimony contradicts Hastert's public stance so far: that he learned about it from ABC News.

First, Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, is expected to tell the House ethics committee today that Hastert's chief of staff Scott Palmer told him he'd spoken to Hastert personally about Foley's problem as early as 2002.

Neither Fordham nor his lawyer have confirmed this crucial detail on the record. But an anonymous source -- who seems to be intimately acquainted with Fordham's side of the story -- told both The Washington Post and Newsweek that this what Fordham remembers -- and that's what he'll tell the ethics committee. (Palmer has vaguely rebuffed Fordham's account of Palmer's 2002 or 2003 intervention with Foley, and one imagines that he will dispute this part of it too.)

Second, Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) says that he talked to Hastert about Foley earlier this spring. "I took it to my supervisor," Reynolds says.

Third is House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) who also remembers talking to Hastert about the matter in the spring.

Read more »

ThinkProgress has a great clip of K.A. Paul, the evangelist who says he convinced House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to resign, doing his thing on MSNBC.

"Look at -- Chicago Sun Times says, 'Hastert Security Breach.' That is ridiculous. If Hastert and President Bush cannot protect their own homes, how could they protect American people?" Paul summed up for the puzzled MSNBC host. "You know a lot of lies are going on, and - Dennis Hastert never said, all he said is, it's a privileged discussion."

My phone rang yesterday evening, and it was everybody's favorite spiritual adviser to the scum of the earth, Mr. K.A. Paul!

"My people told me that I shouldn't talk to you. I was told after they did research on you you're a small reporter and you did negative things," said Paul, who claims to have spent hours talking with some of the greatest despots of the last two decades. "I said, 'I don't care, I'm going to call him.'"

"I made a commitment to you," said Paul, recalling our earlier conversation. "You want to write bad about me, go ahead. But there is a Judgment Day," he observed, with a note of warning in his voice. "I have to keep my word."

In our conversation, Paul explained that House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) isn't the first Republican to give him a nice chunk of face-time. He said that when they were in power, he had "extensive," "3-hour" sit-downs with GOP heavyweights Tom DeLay, Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich. He also had a two-and-a-half hour meeting with Bob and Elizabeth Dole, he said. Others:

George W. Bush: "I met him on several occasions," Paul told me, including in Des Moines, Iowa, and at Bush's church in Austin, Tex. "I prayed with him," he said. "I appreciated it when in 2000 president Bush got on his knees and prayed with me," recalled Paul. "What I don't appreciate is his 2004 speech, 'I have political capital, and I'm going to spend it.'. . . . If you are humble, sincere and honest, God will bless you," Paul cautioned. "If not, it doesn't matter who you are, you will be defeated."

Condolleezza Rice: Rice "called me on July 24, 2003. . . I asked, 'President Bush, why is he not calling me?' They said, 'No, he's in the room.'" (More details about the conversation, he said, were available in his new book.)

Bill O'Reilly: "I've been on his show a dozen times since 1999," said Paul, who called O'Reilly "my good friend." "[He] says he's fair and balanced, but he's not!"

As for Dennis Hastert, he said he met him first "in a casual way" when he was speaking at "a prayer breakfast dinner" in Washington, D.C. in 1997. He also met him at a Promise Keepers rally in 1997 in Washington, D.C.

Paul said that in the past day he'd received calls from Larry King Live, the CBS Morning News and dozens of other outlets. "I need to spend more time with the media!" he exclaimed, as if chastising himself for forgetting to do so. He didn't mention that shortly after his Tuesday meeting with Hastert, his assistant had sent a barrage of emails to media outlets featuring the original AP story of Paul's visit to Hastert, along with Paul's cell phone number.

I spoke -- briefly -- with a man who says he is the Rev. K.A. Paul, "spiritual adviser to the scum of the Earth," who had a remarkable 40-minute prayer-and-discussion meeting yesterday with House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL).

I reached the man by calling a cellular telephone number provided by an anonymous tipster.

"He never said that," Paul told me when I asked his reaction to the claim, apparently from Hastert's office, that the embattled GOP leader had been "duped" into meeting with Paul.

I pointed out that it had been reported this morning in the Chicago Sun-Times. "I don't dupe anybody," he said. "That's ridiculous." Hastert was "gracious," Paul said. "He welcomed me, he hosted me."

"That's why I think a lot of people don't talk to the media," he opined.

Paul said he'd met Hastert before, but not "in an extended way," like the meeting yesterday. But he's met with former House majority leader Tom DeLay "many times," including dinner with The Hammer at his Texas home in early 2001, Paul told me.

Paul, whose ministry includes counseling world leaders in trouble -- particularly despots, murderers and troublemakers -- begged off the phone, but promised to call back later for a longer chat.

Investigative mag Mother Jones scores a lengthy chat with questionable evangelist and Dennis Hastert confidante K.A. Paul, winning new details of his meeting yesterday with the embattled speaker of the House.

It turns out Paul's meeting was for 7 a.m., but he showed up a half-hour late, says MoJo:

The two men withdrew into a private room where, Paul says, he launched into a sermon about what Hastert should do. Paul told Mother Jones that he cited politicians whose reputations suffered when they resisted stepping down: Donald Rumsfeld, Tom DeLay, Bill Clinton. “I said ‘If you don’t do that, the Republicans will lose control of the Congress, you will no longer be Speaker in 30 days, and at the same time they will all blame you because of Foley scandal. You want that for you? You want that to be your life legacy after accomplish so many good things?’ So that’s what convinced him.”

“God gave me this position that I don’t deserve,” Paul says Hastert told him. “For the good of the people, I will do it.”

The Chicago Sun-Times today reported Hastert was "duped" into meeting with Paul. Hastert's office maintains he is not stepping down.

Bonus: Paul tells MoJo he knew al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi “when he was nobody.” Dubbed the "spiritual adviser to the scum of the Earth," Paul says he has counseled such men as Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Khaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Liberia's Charles Taylor, and former House majority leader Tom DeLay.

Rep. Stephanie Herseth (D-SD) recently became the latest figure to call on House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to step down over his mishandling of the Foley page scandal. That gave us a reason to update our list of folks demanding Hastert's ouster.

The list has grown, thanks to Herseth, editorials in the Los Angeles Times and the New Hampshire Union Leader, and a host of others. Check it out. If we missed a call, let us know!

House Speaker Dennis Hastert was "duped" into meeting with an eccentric globetrotting evangelist and his associate, according to today's Chicago Sun-Times.

According to the paper's account, a "massive coincidence" is how the evangelist, K.A. Paul, finagled a meeting with Hastert, who's currently facing one of the biggest crises of his career, that also threatens the power of the GOP.

An associate of Paul's says he just happened to be driving through Plano, Ill., on Monday night, near Hastert's home. At a restaurant there he encountered Hastert and his security contingent. The associate, Dennis Ryan, approached Hastert and called Rev. Paul.

"Hastert talked to Paul and apparently decided to make the Tuesday date with him without consulting his advisors," the paper concludes.

The next morning at 7:30, Paul arrived at Hastert's house with an AP reporter in tow and associate Ryan, who had by now armed himself with a camera.

The paper says Hastert and Paul met for 40 minutes -- not the half hour reported yesterday -- and they prayed together. Paul also "laid hands" on Hastert, and called on him to resign, the Sun-Times reported.

The paper does not explain why Hastert chose to meet with Paul, how the "reverend" evaded traditional security checks, or why Hastert isn't going on record about any of this.

From a 2004 article (sub. req.) in The New Republic on Dr. K.A. Paul, House Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-IL) go-to guy for last minute soul-searching:

Over the past two decades, Kilari Anand Paul, a self-described "Hindu-born follower of Jesus," has cultivated a peculiar specialty as spiritual adviser to the scum of the earth. Liberia's Charles Taylor, Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein are among the more infamous butchers to talk with Paul about the moral implications of running a brutal, repressive, and occasionally genocidal regime. In fact, Dr. Paul, as everyone calls him (thanks to an honorary degree from Living Word Bible College in Swan River, Manitoba), has counseled scores of corrupt political leaders at all levels of government, as well as warlords, rebels, and terrorists from Mumbai to Manila to Mogadishu. By Paul's estimate, he has gone mano a mano with the leaders of every significant terrorist and rebel group in the 89 countries where his ministry operates.